Monday, May 14, 2018

Playing Hardball to Create Peace in the Middle East

On the same day the United States opens its new embassy in
Jerusalem, Hamas sends dozens to die in suicidal waves on the Israeli border
with Palestine. Both moves are statements; one strategic, the other desperate. Seemingly
at odds, when combined, the Middle East is saying it’s time to move on. In
asymmetric stokes, the United States is declaring that the past is the past;
that there is no peace in it; that the road ahead is new, unpaved, and uncharted.
Hamas, one of the vestiges of that past, screams in agony that the ears in the
region have gone deaf to their pleas.

Changing the Game

The Middle East of the latter half of the 20th
Century and dawn of the 21st has been a multi-party matrix of
polarities based on volatile combinations of highly charged win-lose scenarios.
This is not an area where win-win diplomacy has worked well. It is also not an
area peace by force has provided anything more that temporary respite. Mostly,
the Middle East’s core competency is grinding human flesh into meat. Both
taking life and losing life have become commodities measured in hundreds of
thousands of graves. Planet Earth has seen hundreds of thousands of innocent
lives taken over the hubris of greed and power. Cousins turn into blood feud
enemies. Neighbors on one day turn guns on each other the next. The reasons are
many, almost all are pointless. Dreams of influence and power, control of trade
and natural resources, ethnic cleansing for the sake of religious intolerance; all
it’s done is left too many women who sell flowers and little boys who sell ice
cream dead in forgotten ditches or splattered like paint onto the rubble of
explosive debris. These examples are not fiction. Diplomacy, the kind that
talks but does not act, has done little but keep the killing fields fertile.

Creating paths to peace requires choosing winners
arbitrarily. Not by promoting self-determination; we already know the warring
parties there’s choice is to perpetuate death as their coin of negotiation. Frankly,
it’s how they milk the system. No. If we want real peace we need to take endless
negotiation out of the equation. The world, or rather the powerful of the
world, need to pick the outcomes and the pathways to manage the fate of the losers.

Benevolent Manifest Destiny

The Machiavellian model here is not democracy, it’s the
marshaling of resources to impose better outcomes. The analogy that comes to
mind is the taming of the American West. The latter 1800’s in America was a
period when wars as a tool of statecraft were ending and the rule of law began
to eclipse armies of occupation. The tool used for this was the US Circuit
Court system of judges and marshals that had the power, in their individually
jurisdictions to declare parties legitimate or outlaws; and enforce order under
the shield of law accordingly. It eventually turned territories onto states
that became self-governing with individually unique qualities; the American
West the world knows today.

Let’s look at one facet of this puzzle. The clearest case
for this ahead is in the country of Syria where stability is probably only
possible by sectoring the country into imposed districts.

Northwestern Syria, the section held by Bashar al-Assad and
this Alawites, is the new East Germany. It’s district judge is Russia. Its
problem is the purging of what’s left of al-Qaeda and its various expressions
of al Nusra and ISIS. Caught in this crossfire are the non-Alawite democratic
factions that used to be part of a more inclusive Syria of a few decades ago
but are in constant danger of teetering into the clutches of warlords who might
turn the region into another Afghanistan. The conflict metaphor here is the sectarian
governance of the Alawite model vs. the heavy-handed Salafist model of al
Qaeda. The question for the world is how to enable the district judge to
succeed in making sure the Alawite model prevails and northwestern Syria moves
past the human rights sins of both Assad and his Islamist foes while seeking
the restoration of broader inclusiveness in a post-Assad northwestern Syria. The
latter is a challenge because the designated judge, Russia, isn’t exactly the most
inclusive or tolerant of players.

Southern Syria is the section occupied by the Iranians. This
is the westernmost projection of what is called the Shia Crescent, Imam
controlled Iran’s dream of regional Middle East dominion. It is the powder keg
and flash point of Middle East instability. The inability of Iran to get to the
shores of the Mediterranean because the path is blocked to the west by the
Israelis has been marked by military posturing and dueling that shows no sign
of abating. This is metaphor here is immovable trench warfare. The only actual
solutions are for either (a) Iran to abandon its agenda or (b) Israel and Iran
to reach a peaceful armistice that allows for constructive economic conditions
to emerge. For that, cooler heads, particularly in Iran, need to prevail. This
is not presently feasible. Oddly, the decision of the US to abandon the 2014 Nuclear
Treaty with Tehran actually creates a new basis for resolving the southern
Syria issue by opening a pathway to tie Tehran’s regional behavior not just in
Syria but in the Nineveh Plains of Iraq to a new round of negotiations. The
gambit is reinforced by the US overture inviting participation by Saudi Arabia
and the Gulf States, who are showing encouraging signs of liberalizing
proactively, to help stabilize eastern Syria. The move, in military parlance,
closes a salient created by the Iranians during the ISIS period further pushing
them to an inevitable negotiated outcome. This is bold move stuff being pushed
by cool cucumbers like US president Donald Trump and his team. A second Nobel
Peace Prize would be well earned if it works.

Eastern Syria is the American sector. This is about as close
as it gets to the frontier conditions of the American West of the 1800’s; where
the American military occupies and patrols in a role more akin the the U.S.
Cavalry of the Wild West. We sit on a powder keg on the knife edge of military
governorship. And regionally, this is the most difficult sector to possess. Where
western and southern Syria are set piece containments, eastern Syria harbors a
flashpoint for a far broader regional breakdown. It’s because of the Kurds. A
partner to facilitating America’s occupation agenda, the dream of an
independent Kurdistan holds within it a war that would engulf Syria, Turkey and
Iraq for a century. It may be ok with the Kurds who see only their hopes with
myopic intensity; but everyone else who looks into this abyss sees casualty
numbers that would equal if not exceed what the region has already suffered. The
US has counseled both patience to the Kurds, difficultly, and accommodation by
the sovereign nations within which the Kurds live, with even more difficulty. It
will test the United States’ ability to reluctantly manage conflicting party coexistence
over a long term yet again. On the plus side, there is probably no other nation
on earth whose own history of being forged out of diverse dissonance can ascend.
Perhaps that is why God has placed us in that part of the His former Garden of
Eden at this point in human history.

We do stand a chance at this. The philosophy of “nation
building” American-style has been applied in other tumultuous environments with
success. The United States, under the command of Douglas MacArthur, used
similar methods to stabilize the post-Spanish Empire colony of the Philippine
Islands in the early 20th Century. MacArthur, a product of a
flowering of other statesmen-generals like Marshall, Eisenhower, and others who
saw the world stage as manageable, repeated the formula again in post-Imperial
Japan after World War II. The United States, post MacArthur, did the same in a
place called South Korea; a country that is about to bear the fruits of America’s
sixty-eight (68) years of patience and commitment. Anyone who tries to tell you
the USA doesn’t have the ability or skill to play the long game, don’t you
believe it. We have, many times.

The only times we’ve lost on this planet is when we’ve
abandoned and left regions to wallow in their own misery. The vacuum effect of
our missing influence has been consistent; slow economic recovery in places
strewn with uncleared minefields and, in too many instances, death due to gang
warfare between criminal warlords. We’ve learned a little that our choices have
consequences, probably not enough. But maybe enough to give the world a few
more miracles to remember.

I’ll close by noting that I’ve written about his subject in
the past. The last time I pointed out that the United States must ponder the
long-term implications of our destiny on the world stage was 2003. At the time,
we were arguing about the weapons of mass destruction of one Saddam Hussein and
debating whether to invade Iraq. I wrote we’d have to have the stomach to stay
for at least 75 years to do it right. I recall at that time there was another
fellow being quoted as saying similarly pensive things.

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About Me

Dennis Santiago is a life long public policy analyst with a background of contributions to U.S. national, foreign and financial policy as well as a C-suite technologist with a history of innovation going back the the 1990's era of the Internet. Mr. Santiago presently serves as the Managing Director for Research and Development at Total Bank Solutions LLC responsible for developing new financial product instruments and financial technology infrastructure solutions. He is the author of the Bank Monitor system in use by federal, state and financial institutions to assess the safety and soundness of U.S. banks.